Business Phone System Reviews | SE Telecom

On Wednesday, the Globe and Mail reported that a pilot program to test making credit card payments with your smart phone has officially launched. The pilot program is a partnership between Visa, Royal Bank and Rogers Communications.

The pilot program, announced a year ago and getting underway this June, is built upon a simple premise: people use their smart phones for nearly everything these days, so why not allow them to make instant credit card purchases.

The new technology, currently installed in only a certain type of Motorola phones, uses near field communications whereby a tiny chip inside the phone interacts with a sensor on a retailer’s payment terminal. Transactions take only seconds to complete, and receipts can be delivered over SMS.

Though the amount of retailers accepting these new payments is unknown, any store that use Visa’s new payWave terminals (which use a similar chip installed on a credit card) will be able to accept mobile phone payments.

The convenience of this new system is hard to argue – speed and portability allows the consumer to carry less, and move through lines quicker. However, the main stumbling block remains ensuring the security of the new smart phone transactions.

Transaction data from the new chips will be encrypted, not visible to the carrier or the retailer. What’s more, there will likely be an unlocking or password required for charges over $20, and other precautions set against fraud or lost devices. But consumers may still be wary to send their financial information over unfamiliar airwaves.

“The data is stored and transmitted in an encrypted way, so when the phone is being waved in front of the point-of-sale terminal, it’s not your number being transmitted, it’s an encrypted version,” explains Mike Bradley, vice-president of products at Visa Canada. “It’s always a balance between security and convenience. If you ask consumers about security, they want more of it. But when they are asked to make tradeoffs with usage, accessibility and convenience, that’s where the forced tradeoffs are required.”

The final hurdle, naturally, will also be availability. Before something like this catches on in the mainstream – and we see no reason it won’t eventually – more phones need to be manufactured with the chips and software installed, and more credit card companies need to launch their own versions of Visa’s pilot program.

Bloomberg has started the wildfire of rumors yet again. This time the rumor mill revolves around the iPhone coming to Verizon Wireless. This rumor runs rampant every year around Apples developer conferences and yearly iPhone releases.

What makes this rumor so different? Bloomberg claims it has two people that know the plans. These two informants are boasting that the Apple Love Phone will be coming to Big Red in January 2011.

Where do these rumors get ground to stand on? First up is the exclusive AT&T contract with Apple. Details have been very sketchy on how this deal works out. When the iPhone first hit the market in 2007, all consumers really knew was that AT&T would have the phone exclusively for two years. Amazingly, that two-year mark has come and gone now.

What else will give these rumors to stand? Verizon is currently working on upgrading its network to 4G. This is almost three times faster than what AT&T can offer. AT&T can’t keep up with the data demand they have now, let alone think about upgrading from a 3G network to a 4G network. Verizon is also going to do a bit of unveiling of 4G devices during the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2011.

The biggest rumor growth hormone comes in customer base. Apple might have sold 1.7 million iPhone 4s in the first three days of release, but how much more would they have sold had the phone been available on multiple networks? Apple is currently missing a large market that is crying out for the iPhone.

The final nail could come with the data plan death that AT&T announced just before the iPhone 4 announcements. AT&T is currently the only wireless carrier to cap cell phone data usage. This means all that fun Face Time video chatting comes at a cost of data. Verizon has not announced any plans to cap data usage.

While this is but a rumor, it certainly is getting more ground to stand on.  AT&T is riddled with complaints about its unreliable network. Apple is looking for more revenue, and there is a growing customer demand for the iPhone on Verizon. January could be a very exciting month for Verizon Customers.

October will be a big month for Avaya, as they’re releasing a new data-center strategy. This strategy is much simpler than rows of racks with equipment. Avaya is looking to bring a one-box data-center to life. This new one-box data-center is aimed squarely at taking on Cisco and their one-box strategy.

This might sound like a miracle box, but it has some gotchas. The biggest is that while Cisco has a one-box strategy that contains a switch, servers, storage solutions, and applications; Avaya’s solution will contain only a switch. The reasoning for this is due to Avaya lacking the other components in its current assets.

It might look like Cisco is providing the better solution for customers, but Avaya attacks this thought process as well. Avaya goes on to point out that a datacenter does not start with a box, but rather the applications and then designing the datacenter around those applications.

Avaya is following through with this thought by focusing their one-box strategy by focusing on the infrastructure side of the coin. This will allow customers to select products that best fit their needs. Currently, Avaya is going to leave all the memory, CPU, and performance tuning to vendors that specialize in that kind of gear.

Whom will Avaya market their miracle device in a box to? The current plan is to target customers with Nortel switches that are looking to replace older technologies. The reason for targeting Nortel customers is due to the nice partnership that Avaya has with Nortel now. This partnership is what is allowing this expansion from communications gear into datacenter gear.

Avaya will also target their voice customers as well, but know that a datacenter switch will be a hard sell. The benefit of this switch is that the design consists of a 10-year life span. This will drive the cost of ownership to almost half of what the competitions has. Could this lead to even better voice equipment down the road as well. If Avaya sticks to 10-year life cycles, they could easily become a force to be reckoned with.